by Angela Guess
A new article takes a look at the growing amounts of data burying small to midlevel businesses and what software companies are doing to help: “The online age has done wonders to help small companies loom larger in the public eye, but that virtual growth is not simply a marketing phenomenon. Some small and midsize businesses today find themselves contending with enterprise-like amounts of data, but without the equivalent resources to properly manage it.”
The article continues, “That’s a sentiment expressed by vendors, analysts, and smaller companies alike. ‘One of the things that’s been very clear in the last five years or so is that big data problems and big volumes of data are not an issue relegated to large enterprises,’ said Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile in an interview. Jaspersoft, which makes business intelligence (BI) software, is among a group of open source companies pushing their interoperable ‘data stack’–their phrase for the spectrum of database on one end to analytics and BI on the other–as a viable alternative to proprietary platforms.”
It goes on, “Gentile is not alone in preaching the SMB data explosion. ‘It is a myth that the analytical requirements in smaller companies are less rigorous than large ones. In fact, it is often the opposite,’ said Neil Raden, founder and president of Hired Brains, via email interview. ‘We have clients with fewer than 100 employees who have data warehouses or equivalents in the petabyte range, because data is their business.’ That’s echoed by Cloudera’s vice president of products Charles Zledewski. ‘If you look at small and medium-sized businesses, there are a lot of them where their entire business is predicated upon data,’ said Zledewski in an interview.”
photo credit: freddthompson
